Employee training and education is becoming increasingly critical to the success of organizations within today's modern global economy. As a minimum requirement to remaining competitive, companies that operate in today's complex industries need employees who remain knowledgeable and current in areas of expertise, enabling their employees to serve the companies' evolving strategic objectives. Executives of such companies, therefore, have a need for improved learning solutions as their various business imperatives bring to the forefront of their strategic objectives a demand for qualified employees.
The increasing complexity of operating modern corporations, however, has increased the difficulty of training corporate employees effectively and efficiently. As corporate business imperatives become more diverse, the demand for diverse course offerings increases. The demand for subject matter experts (“SME”) who possess the diverse skill sets necessary to train corporate employees in a multitude of knowledge areas also increases accordingly.
Unfortunately, corporations need a workforce that is well educated in areas concerned with both the technical aspects and the overall business imperatives of the corporation. There is therefore a need for learning solutions that facilitate the development of courses that are aligned with corporate business imperatives, while providing corporate employees with the technical expertise needed to run the corporation.
Sales forces in particular must be effectively trained regarding new product features and value propositions before the best sales results can be obtained. Similarly, new positioning of existing products (e.g., pitching groups of products together as providing improved solutions to clients) requires sales forces to understand not just products individually, but their interplay in forming solutions for target clients in order to effectively implement the strategic business objective. The longer such training takes, the more the implementation of strategic business objectives is delayed.
To reduce corporate training costs, course developers must design course curricula such that information is presented to the students in a manner that maximizes student retention rates and increases employee efficiency. To ensure that student retention rates are maximized, performance-gauging metrics should be pre-defined and tests administered to ensure that the execution of a specific course adequately satisfies the pre-defined metrics. These tests may be performed on students before and after course completion and may be used as feedback for course redesign and subsequent course implementations.
Thus, with proper learning solution systems, the efficiency of employee training may be maximized, thus minimizing costs, by implementing a system of integration and controls to ensure that corporate training is strategically aligned with corporate business objectives. In this manner, modern corporations may remain competitive by maximizing the internal rate of return of their important learning centers. This, in turn, directly impacts the performance of traditional profit centers.
The learning capabilities of a corporation must also be able to support organizational growth and expansion. Without such effective learning systems, leaders of companies may be forced to forgo undertaking bold, yet lucrative, business growth plans because bold growth plans require that a company have the ability to rapidly attract, train, and/or deploy a skilled workforce. Thus, a need exists for a system that improves learning capabilities by integrating existing course competencies with those presented by organizational growth and expansion, thereby accelerating the training speed and speed to competency of an entire corporate workforce.
For example, corporate mergers and reorganizations are commonplace occurrences in many of today's markets and industries. Such mergers and reorganizations often necessitate massive post-merger/reorganization integration efforts by the remaining companies. This not only requires reconciling pre-existing business goals and strategies, but also requires integrating and upgrading educational and training efforts within the corporate entities the remain after the mergers. Improved learning solutions that develop coordinated training courses should be capable of handling such occurrences by easily modifying existing training efforts to match the changing business environment.
Similarly, corporate executives may have business imperatives requiring the initiation of a culture change within the company, the implementation of which will ultimately enable a pre-existing workforce to more easily adapt to the company's changing business focus. An effective integrated learning solution must, therefore, be capable of serving as a tool to drive culture change within an organization. Common culture change themes that require significant learning efforts include quality control changes, initiatives to increase shareholder value, and steps for adopting a customer-centric business focus.
Education within modern companies, however, remains problematic for various reasons. One major complicating factor is the nature of many modern corporations. Often, they are diverse entities that operate globally across international boundaries and in different competitive markets and business areas. Organizations or groups within such modern companies that are charged with learning course or content development and management of learning services are often poorly equipped (either in terms of personnel allocation, organization of the learning assets, infrastructure, or otherwise) to serve all the learning needs of those companies. As such, learning service organizations or groups are often plagued with outdated course content and/or inefficient management services that fail to utilize current technologies to dynamically develop and deliver meaningful courses and related necessary course materials.
Computers have been increasingly employed to address many of the logistical issues associated with the development of learning content for courses that may be taught at multiple times, to large numbers of students who are remotely located, and/or to a student body that has conflicting schedules of availability. For example, computer-delivered instruction systems are available wherein students can receive instruction via a computer over a network by accessing a central repository of previously prepared electronic learning (“e-learning”) content courses and/or materials stored on a remote server. The increasing use of computers therefore presents logistical challenges that must be considered in course content development for modern learning systems.
Thus, there is a need for a learning solution that integrates course content development modules that reflect the identification and prioritization of learning needs and enable the efficient design and development of learning content and delivery of that learning content so as to maximize student retention rates. Further, such a learning solution should remain business driven such that course content always remains strategically aligned with corporate business objectives. Contemporary learning solutions currently employed in the business world have failed to integrate content development functions with the overall learning solution to achieve these ends.
There therefore remains a need in the art for an improved business driven learning solution that integrates course content development so as to overcome the above-described issues and other problems associated with current learning solutions. Such a solution preferably utilizes a learning system wherein the course content development operations are seamlessly integrated with the overall learning solution and which produces course content that remains aligned with corporate strategies and objectives. The aforementioned learning solution should provide the ability to design course materials that maximize return on investment and are responsive to client objectives.